Girardoniʼs work, at the most basic level, is an invitation to think about the relationship between light and material. Historically this is what artists have always done - figuring out how to represent space and form with paint or stone. Fast forward through the the advent of photography, the flattening of the picture plane, and abstraction and now we have visual art where experience is becoming the art itself. We are standing at a point where technology and human perception are merging and it is in this collision of virtual systems and our natural selves where we find the work in "Resonance".
The exhibition will be an installation of twelve cast resin disks, one for each of the twelve colors of the HSV Color Wheel. Complementing the installation is a digital component in the form of a downloadable app that sonnifies (turns into sound) the color and light of each disk. It is an experience that begins with a very traditional presentation of art as an object hanging on the wall and then, with the app acting as a new extension of our five senses, the piece augments reality to allow the viewer to be able to hear color.
It goes to the heart of how we are using technology to interface with the world more and more everyday and it raises questions of where the art actually lies; is it in the physical piece hanging on the wall or in the digital device in our hand or in the hearing of the sound created by the app?
Johannes Girardoni, born in Austria, is an Los Angeles based sculptor and installation artist who has been working in the United States for almost 30 years. His reductive investigations focus on the intersection of light, material, and human perception and anchor his work in the Southern California based Light and Space movement. He recently completed a piece titled “Metaspace 1 (Infinite Room)”, which is a large-scale, permanent interactive light and sound sculpture conceived as architecture in a building designed by Cooper-Hewitt / Smithsonian National Architecture Design Award winner Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects. “Metaspace V2” was exhibited at the 2014 TED Conference in Vancouver, BC. Girardoni’s art has been widely shown in galleries and museums in the US and internationally including at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy; the Ludwig Museum, Germany; the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; and the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. Girardoni has been the subject of features and reviews both nationally, and internationally including in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art in America, and Sculpture among others.
